CMO Canva, Zach Kitschke: From Employee Number 5 To $40 Billion Valuation

Canva CMO Zach Kitschke was the company’s fifth employee, joining right before the product launched to the public — or, that was the plan anyway. Emerging technologies like HTML5 and negative feedback from early testers delayed the debut of the design startup, but in the 10 years since its launch Canva has become one of the most successful companies to ever come out of Australia. “One of our values is to set crazy big goals and make them happen,” Zach says.

In this episode, Zach and Joubin discuss Zach’s first job in small-town bureaucracy, how he got introduced to Canva before the company was hiring anyone, helping teammates achieve their potential, “culture carriers,” the pressure of comparing your companies to others, Canva’s “underwhelming” launch night and finding product-market fit, the four pillars of success in Canva’s culture, localization as a growth strategy, predictable anxiety, the hypergrowth gap, and “the two-step plan.”

In this episode, we cover:

• What Canva does, and where the idea came from (08:08)
• Zach’s first impressions of Canva co-founders Mel Perkins and Cliff Obrecht (12:49)
• Making bets on unproven people in an organization (16:41)
• Setting “crazy big goals” and readying Canva v1 for launch (21:17)
• The pre-launch inferiority complex  (27:30)
• An important cold email from the Huffington Post (33:59)
• Wearing many hats in a startup and building company culture (36:17)
• Learning on the job and managing a hypergrowth company (45:23)
• How does Canva’s growth compare to what Zach expected? (51:09)
• Canva’s unique approach to work-life balance, and Mel and Cliff’s philanthropic “two-step plan” (59:23)

Links:

• Connect with Zach
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
• Connect with Joubin
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com 
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm